Email Using MXRoute.com For @yourdomain Emails

Google Suite legacy free edition is ending and forcing users to upgrade to Google Workspace paid plans for @yourdomain email hosting. As such folks are looking at email hosting alternatives such as Yandex, Microsoft and Zoho etc. For Zoho Email I posted a guide here. So thought I'd do the same for MXRoute.com which I use for my less important domains. MXRoute uses a DirectAdmin as the underlying system with their own branding and modifications for email hosting. My definition of less important, are domains not tied to any service/product registration i.e. web hosting, domain registrar registration etc.

I picked up MXRoute Black Friday 2020 special which each year they post at https://mxroute.blackfriday/ for the following heavily discounted price.

Just perfect for parked domains or less important domains that do not need Google Suite or Google Workspace and their associated costs.

Their documentation isn't as polished but for the price I can live with it - afterall it's email I am focused on. They have their own community forums https://community.mxroute.com/.

After signup, you get email and instructions to setup the initial account domain and you get the MX records to use. These MX records will be used for all subsequent domains you add later on too.

Below is an example of adding a subsequent domain to MXRoute control panel log (DirectAdmin) based. I replaced the actual domain with domain.com placeholder text just for illustration purpose.

MXRoute Control Panel

When you login you add a new domain - ignore the PHP/CGI checkboxes, that is DirectAdmin style related and has no bearing on MXRoute emails.

Domain listing page where you can select the domain you want to manage or add new domains etc.



MXRoute Account Manager is where you add domains, subdomains and the DKIM Keys section is a page for DNS records auto created - you can ignore all DNS records as it's only used to get the generated DKIM Keys DNS record which you need to add to your DNS provider.



Communication section, haven't really looked at that as I mainly focus on email.



Email Manager is where you add email accounts, forwarders, auto responders etc.



Advance feature section - domain pointers are domain aliases so user@domain1 and user@domain2 got to same account


Webmail offered in a variety of webmail interfaces. I don't really use these as I use IMAP with my own mail clients like Bluemail on Android or Windows Mail.

MXRoute Create Domain

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Create the new domain you intend to have MXRoute manage email for. Ignore CGI/PHP settings only cosmetic due to underlying DirectAdmin templating.


Domain listing after new domain added.

MXRoute Create Domain Email Addresses

Selecting the domain from top dropdown menu to manage that domain and then go to Email Manager > Email accounts to create a new email address. You will see a default @domain email created. You can not delete that account, it's the account linked to the underlying Linux system user account created which houses and stores your email on disk.



Create a new email address



You'll be greeted with the relevant info. But you will need the initial setup domain for your MX DNS records and SPF record.



In my case, the relevant info was like

DO NOT use the same POP/IMAP/SMTP/MX records as this as yours may differ. The SPF record should be the same though.

Notes:

• From testing looks like for external outbound emails, MXRoute also via mail server relay filters and strips the server's originating IP address too. So if you use MXRoute's smtp server for web site/php apps like Wordpress or Xenforo, MXRoute does strip the real server IP for originating email from the server as MXRoute uses a mail server relay and that probably strips the originating IP before handing off to their mail server that actually sends the email. So your receiving email headers will have the from mail server IP belonging to the intermediate relay server IP and not your server IP. Just like Amazon SES which strips the originating real server IP address.
• However, that stripping of real server originating IP only applies to external outbound emails. Local emails to same domain/mail server will still reveal the originating real server IP. So if you have MXRoute domain user@domain1 sending emails to user2@domain1, the real server IP address is still shown in the mail headers for receiving email. So you want to be sure to trust your local users *@domain1 with the knowledge of your real server IP address when using MXRoute smtp for web apps like Xenforo or Wordpress. So for forum usage as an example, if you had assigned each staff/admin/moderator a *@domain1 email address and you setup the forums to use MXRoute smtp for sending emails. Then any forum outbound sent email to all staff/admin/moderators to their @domain1 email address will reveal your real server IP address to them.

 

Was also curious to know how clean MXRoute's mail server IPs are so added some IPs to my blacklist monitoring service with my Hetrixtools account (referral link). Besides uptime and system monitoring, Hetrixools also does blacklist monitor so will be able to monitor their IPs on blacklists over time

From MXRoute regarding IP reputation MXroute Documentation

Hetrixtools monitors 91 blacklist databases!